Remember Chico Escuela?

He was a character created by Actor Garrett Morris on the “Saturday Night Live” TV show, back in the 1970’s. Morris became famous for uttering these simple words in broken-English, with a Spanish-sounding accent: “Beisbol …been bery bery good to me …”

“Chico” was a fictitious professional baseball player from the Dominican Republic. He barely spoke English, but loved the fact that he was able to leave his impoverished homeland and come to the United States, where he was paid quite handsomely to play ball. And each time “Weekend Update” Anchor Jane Curtain would introduce Chico on the news set (eliciting an equally accented “tank yoo Hane” response), you knew that he would soon be asked a question that he couldn’t answer in English, and would resort to his “ bery bery good” line.

That was in the 70’s. And now in the year 2008, an adaptation of Chico’s famous line fits nicely in describing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: “Capitalism been berry berry good to them..”

It’s been a few weeks since the Clintons and the Obamas publicly released their tax records. Based on this information, it is now known as fact what many of us could have safely assumed: both families rank among America’s economic “upper class.”

Just as is the case with her entire political career, Hillary’s earnings are, of course, inextricably tied to her husband. As a former U.S. President, Bill Clinton has quite rightly made lots of money as a consultant, author, and public speaker, and this has helped bring the couple’s combined earnings to over $109 million between the years 2000-2006.

But apart from Bill, and in addition to her own salary as a United States Senator, during this time period Mrs. Clinton also earned $10.5 million in royalties from her book “Living History.” That’s some pretty nice cash, and we have yet to see how she fared in the year 2007.

Mr. Obama is understandably less wealthy than the Clintons. Even so, since 2000 he has earned over $8 million, largely because of royalty income from his books “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity Of Hope.”

The big irony here is that while Obama has done extremely well for himself in our very unique free-market economy, he has the “audacity” to demonize others who have done well for themselves, and to propose economic policies that, if implemented, would radically change our nation into something more akin to a Western European socialist state. Continued...